SpaceX claims Starlink Mobile will be better than AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon

“Unless Starlink can secure an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) agreement from one of the carriers, which would provide a baseline ‌of ⁠coverage, it’s extraordinarily challenging to imagine a direct-to-consumer service from Starlink that could be competitive with carrier services in the next five years,” telecom analyst Craig Moffett said, according to Reuters. T-Mobile has already partnered with SpaceX, while AT&T and Verizon have deals with satellite company AST SpaceMobile. But all three big carriers seem to want non-SpaceX satellite providers to help fill in dead spots in their networks. AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon recently announced a joint venture to pool spectrum “and help satellite providers reach more customers through a unified platform.” Shotwell and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk indicated the firm won’t build large cell towers. Instead, the terrestrial component will consist of “little femtocells around the country,” Shotwell said. She said the plan is to put “a cellular base station on the, basically, the gear that holds a Starlink broadband dish.” Musk seemed to indicate that future Starlink dishes used by homes and businesses could double as cellular base stations. “Instead of having to deploy these very expensive and difficult-to-locate large cellular base stations, we feel reasonably confident that we can deploy a large number of sort of small stations,” he said. “Essentially, they’re really just Starlink dishes that also provide connectivity in the mobile spectrum bands, and have them be all over the place.” Musk said, “Starlink antennas are located on the roofs of houses and businesses. They’ve got a clear view for providing connectivity directly to cellphones on the ground, and in fact, providing connectivity that is, we think, probably better and higher bandwidth than what is currently available from cellular providers.” Shotwell said the current Starlink Mobile system uses 5 MHz through partnerships with telco providers and that the 65 MHz from EchoStar will provide a “massive increase in capability.” When added together, the boosts in spectrum and satellite capabilities will make the system about 100 times better than it is now, she said. How much it will all cost is a concern for investors. SpaceX’s stock price dropped sharply today “after it reported capital expenditure of almost $16 billion on AI, double the previous quarter and well above Wall Street’s expectation,” the Financial Times reported. Building a cellular network will also be expensive, and Shotwell declined to say how much SpaceX will spend on its terrestrial network. “You can have kind of these little femtocells around the country and you deploy that as you need it,” she said. “You don’t have to necessarily spend many billions of dollars in low-band spectrum all upfront before you deploy your system. So that’s why I don’t want to talk about the CapEx for building out the terrestrial, because we have a lot of really kind of great and new ideas for how we’re going to do that, and I think it will be quite CapEx-efficient.” Even if Starlink never becomes a fourth major carrier alongside AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, it could still take a big enough chunk of the mobile market to pose a problem for the big three. The three major carriers’ stock prices fell today after SpaceX announced its intention to compete more directly against them.